We are happy to announce that the Gallery part of our website is now available for viewing! You can see six different algorithms at work.
How did we get here?
This took a while but, like Nature, we are not in a hurry.
One goal was to build this without writing any code by hand, we did it! The demos were always intended to be a key feature of the website, even as research turned into productised drones and agents around us.
The first version of adaptive-emergent went online in August 2024. It used some basic HTML and Svelte, with help from Claude, before Claude Code was really available. At that stage it was mostly style, structure, and a few words.
Mid-2025, and ChatGPT had rewritten the site into a blog, with primers on what “agents” meant at the time. Of course as often happens in society and technology, some definitions take on a life of their own. And let’s face it: “agentic” is just fun to say.
The blog continued to grow as ChatGPT agents began finding and suggesting relevant publications each morning. There is still a human in the loop, mainly to select appealing images and avoid repeating topics already covered elsewhere. Over time, that loop may shrink as models and workflows improve.
And now, on two consecutive wintry weekends (amounting to six human hours chatting with AI), the gallery has come together using ChatGPT and Codex. No human generated code, and in fact ChatGPT made some good suggestions, including adding the slime mould use case, although like most of us, I don’t really understand how a single-celled creature (plant? animal? fungi?) can make decisions. Maybe this will help.
Why not Claude Code?
A reasonable question.
A design goal is to keep the conversation at the subject domain level instead of slipping into coding conversations. For now, ChatGPT is very general purpose across all sorts of topics, not just in the area of software development and biomimetics. Let’s see where code generation using Google Gemini reaches by the end of 2026.
Where to next?
More observation and tweaking on the algorithm.
There are more patterns and geometries to explore: fractals, for example which helped give rise to CGI out of Industrial Light & Magic in the 1980s, along with other structures that may connect to Demis Hassabis’ idea of a “manifold”.
And we still want to keep tracking the larger Dr Dolittle ambition: natural communication systems — or, put simply, learning how to talk to the animals.
